Browsing by Subject "Media"
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Item Open Access "All of My Business": Governmental Social Media and Authoritarian Responsiveness(2017) Liu, ChuanHow would authoritarian regimes react to the emergence of social media compared to traditional media? What role(s) would media play in authoritarianism? This study focuses on China, the largest existing authoritarian regime, to answer the questions above. A formal model first indicates that entering the era of social media would be a challenge for dictators if they still regard social media as a tool for propaganda as traditional media; instead, they would choose other strategies in response to the challenge. The content analysis between Weibo (Chinese Twitter) and People's Daily in China confirms that traditional media and social media serve as different tools: The former are still tools for propaganda, whereas the latter show more responsiveness, especially about the public's daily life, even though this is none of the government's business. This results may indicate a new way by which authoritarian regimes maintain the rule making use of media.
Item Open Access “Chinese Whispers”? The “China” that Disappears from Lossy Communications(2021) Cao, XuenanIn 1949, Bell Lab mathematician Claude Shannon modeled telephone communication by assigning statistic regularity to the rather irregular usage of human language. His lab mate Warren Weaver took a step further, putting the novel Alice in Wonderland through a translation machine in pursuit of a unified form of intercultural communication. Amidst the ideological polarities of the Cold War, this rationalist pursuit was idealistic. Yet today it still guides the scholarly approach to intercultural communication. This approach to data analysis poses a problem: the corporate sector simply has far superior systems of aggregating data and manipulating information, while individual academics would either have to ally with the world’s most popular social media or be forever trapped in isolation and by deficits. My work, on the contrary, focuses on the advantages of studying deficits. It questions why and how details are deliberately stripped out, why and how experience is transformed into algorithmic power, all for creating the impression of mere “data.”
This dissertation has two main objectives, one inwardly focused, the other outwardly oriented: first, to create a dialogue between literary studies and media studies through discussions of informational loss; second, to shift the narrow focus of North American and German media theory by drawing broadly on the material history of literature, media, and art from modern and contemporary China. China studies, a field born out of Cold War contexts in the West, have thus far developed under the growing pressure to track the particularities of this cultural other like China, without paying much attention to what documents are doing to a history rife with deliberately omitted information. This dissertation rectifies this mistreatment of lost details. Targeting communication scholar Marshall McLuhan’s provocation that “the medium is the message,” we may say that what is missing is the message; preserving what is missing in a cultural other end up making us not see China at all.
How do we approach objects that are opaque and always disappearing from view? This study locates this issue at the intersection of media theory and literary theory through reviewing key historical moments in both fields: this study examines the archival compression of the historical figure and the corpus called “Lu Xun” (1881-1936) to rethink the destructive role of print media in constructing Chinese modernity; returns to the industrial production of “books to lose” in the Great Leap Forward (1958-1960) to rethink the inevitable, functional bias of preservation in historiography; reviews the 1980s’ indulgence in a kind of “information fetishism” to reveal that opacity, too, can be a political ideal; and evaluates the claim of China’s 5G and AI “authoritarian networks” to expose the problematic metaphors of informatics. Each of the four chapters draws on literary and artistic texts, including Lu Xun’s untranslated essays (chapter 1), Yan Lianke’s fictional historiographies (chapter 2), Liu Cixin’s politicized science fiction (chapter 3), and emerging media arts in China (chapter 4). Referring to what tends to be hidden by acts of collecting, what becomes opaque, and what gets erased when the technological context is neglected, I borrow the term “lossy” from computer science. This term circumvents the notion of history based on static archives and their imaginary solidity. Interweaving two distinct threads of exposition (media studies and literature), this dissertation provides a multi-fold narrative about history, politics, and China.
Item Open Access Coverage of Burma in Six Elite Newspapers(2011-12-09) Fairchild, CarolineThis project compares the United States, United Kingdom and Thailand’s print media coverage of Burma. Examining six newspapers’ coverage of Burma in 2008 and 2010, the project studies how newspapers frame Burma differently in international coverage. For each newspaper, news coverage of Burma is driven by politics, with an emphasis on the political role of Aung San Suu Kyi. Aside from instances when a specific event demands international engagement with Burma, news organizations rely on policy elites to reduce the cost of reporting news about Burma.Item Open Access Crack-Whores and Pretty Woman: The Media Framing of Sex Workers(2018-12-05) Wang, VictoriaInternational human rights organizations such as the World Health Organization, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, and Amnesty International have advised nations to decriminalize sex work in order to protect the rights and safety of sex workers (“Sex Workers,” 2018; “Sex Workers,” 2014; “Q&A: Policy to Protect the Human Rights of Sex Workers,” 2016). However, policy-makers in the US ignore these recommendations in favor of the full criminalization of sex work (Weitzer, 2010). Media largely influence public perception and policing of sex work, and media framings of sex workers align more with the current policies on sex work in the US than the research conducted and the proposals made by accredited human rights organizations (Nelson, 1997). This study examines newspapers published in California and Texas between 2002 and 2018 to uncover how media frame sex workers. The dominant frames in this dataset, the criminal frame and the victim frame, perpetuate and are reinforced by the US’ stringent sex work policies. The same moral convictions which influenced the criminalization of sex work in the US underlay the dominant frames in the dataset.Item Open Access Déjà-Vu News: How do Local Print and Broadcast Websites Present News?(2009-12-04) Reed, Christopher; Hamilton, JamesNews websites produced by local U.S. newspapers and television news stations appear to most significantly distinguish themselves by having characteristics similar to those of their original medium. As audiences increasingly go online to find out the news, broadcast and print news outlets are finding a way to present their stories and interact with these consumers. This study looks at a sample of local television news and newspaper websites to determine what factors influence their presentation of news. In analyzing 14 unique attributes of local news websites, these results suggest that original medium of the news website matters most in determining the presentation of a local news websites. Market size, cross-medium ownership within a market and national affiliation also influence local news websites to a lesser extent.Item Open Access Endless Question: Youth Becomings and the Anti-Crisis of Kids in Global Japan(2014) Dixon, Dwayne EmilYoung people in Japan contend with shifting understandings of family and friends, insecure jobs, and changing frames around global and national identities. The category of youth itself is unsettled amid a long period of social and economic change and perceived widely as crisis. Within contested social categories of youth, how do young Japanese people use the city, media, and body practices to create flexible, meaningful sociality across spaces of work, education, and play? What do youthful sociality and practices reveal about globally oriented connections and how do they inform conceptions of the future, kinship, gender, and pluralized identities? In short, what is the embodied and affective experience of being young as the category itself is increasingly unstable and full of risks? These questions shape the contours of this project.
This dissertation considers youth through its becoming, that is, the lived enactment of youth as energy, emotion, and sensibility always in motion and within range of cultural, spatial, bodily, and technological forces. Three groups of young people in this layered latitudinal study demonstrate various relations to the city street, visual media, globalized identities, contingent work within affect and cultural production, and education. The three groups are distinctly different but share surprising points of connection.
I lived alongside these three groups to understand the ways young people are innovating within the shifting form of youth. I skated with male skateboarders in their teens to early 30s who created Japan's most influential skate company; I taught kids attending a specialized cram school for kikokushijo (children who have lived abroad due to a parent's job assignment); I observed and hung out with young creative workers, the photographers, web designers, and graphic artists who produce the visual and textual content and relationships composing commercial "youth culture."
My project examines how these young people redefine youth through bodily practices, identities, and economic de/attachments. The skaters' embodied actions distribute/dissipate their energies in risky ways outside formal structures of labor. The kikokushijo children, with their bi-cultural fluency produced in circuits of capitalist labor, offer a desirable image of a flexible Japanese future while their heterogeneous identities appear threatening in the present. The creative workers are precariously positioned as "affective labor" within transglobal (youth) cultural production, working to generate visual and textual content constant stressful uncertainties. All three groups share uneasy ground with capitalist practices, risky social identities, and crucially, intimate relations with city space. In attending to their practices through ethnographic participation and video, this dissertation explores questions concerning youthful relations to space produced in material contacts, remembered geographies of other places and imaginary urban sites.
The dissertation itself is electronic and non-linear; a formal enactment of the drifting contact between forms of youth. It opens up to lines of connection between questions, sites, events, and bodies and attempts an unfolding of affect, imagination, and experience to tell stories about histories of gender and labor, city life, and global dreams. It asks if the globalized forms of Japanese youth avoid the risks of the impossible secure for the open possibilities of becoming and thus refuse containment by crisis?
Item Open Access Essays on the Political Economy of Media and Information Manipulation(2022) Adiguzel, Fatih SerkantThe last two decades have seen an emergence of a new regime type, called mixed regimes, whose democratically elected leaders have slowly eroded institutions of accountability. Unlike democratic breakdowns, such erosions take place in incremental steps, which create uncertainties about what the cumulative effects of these steps will lead to in the future. This dissertation focuses on media and information manipulation to understand how unconstrained leaders use media to sustain popular support and how they leverage such uncertainties for their benefit. I first analyze how governments in mixed regimes manipulate the informational environment in an era of conglomerate-owned media. I argue that state contracts in non-media sectors represent an essential tool for influencing media coverage. I use machine learning to construct a media bias measure and analyze the universe of all state contracts and a vast corpus of newspaper articles from Turkey. I show that conglomerate-owned newspapers are more pro-government than other newspapers. More importantly, this bias grows with the government’s discretion. In return, these conglomerates secure state contracts on favorable terms. Chapter 3 takes the analysis further and analyzes specific information manipulation strategies in captured media. In particular, I answer the following question: how do governments in mixed regimes manipulate economic news in times of economic crisis? Although economic crises may cause regimes to collapse, we see that unconstrained leaders in mixed regimes are resilient even in times of crisis. Using the 2021 currency crisis from Turkey and analyzing the entire corpora of three media outlets, this chapter examines the prevalence of different information manipulation strategies using various machine learning and dictionary methods. While these two chapters focus on media, Chapter 4 instead focuses on how such information manipulation strategies affect citizens in critical junctures, e.g., when asked about institutional changes that pave the way for unconstrained executives. In this chapter, I argue that aspiring unconstrained leaders are more likely to gain popular support when they present checks and balances as obstacles to getting things done. In doing so, these leaders exploit a critical tension between the possibility of gridlock and the abuse of power, which is inherent in democratic institutions. Using cross-national data and leveraging an original survey experiment from Turkey, I show that effective checks and balances decrease democracy satisfaction and that aspiring unconstrained leaders are more likely to gain popular support when they present these institutions as obstacles to getting things done. More interestingly, respondents perceive their gridlock justification to dismantle checks and balances as a pro-democratic attempt to remove the barriers to a policy-responsive regime. Overall, this dissertation project helps us understand how information manipulation in mixed regimes sustains popular support for unconstrained leaders.
Item Open Access ¿Feminicidio? Media Framing of Ciudad Juárez Feminicidios(2020-11-30) Diaz, AlysonAlthough the brutal murders of the women in Ciudad Juárez have captured the attention of the international media and human rights organizations, little research has been conducted on the local media’s reporting about the gender-based murders known as feminicidios. This thesis will investigate whether local media sources recognize feminicidio as a phenomenon in Ciudad Juárez and how feminicidios were portrayed between the years of 2001 and 2005. First, the articles that view the murders of women in Ciudad Juárez as feminicidios were identified, then the articles were categorized by the dominant frame. The difference between the number of articles that recognize and do not recognize feminicidio in this sample reflects the debate present within local media about the incidence of feminicidios in the city. Likewise, the dominant frames in this dataset, the government impunity frame and narrative of crime frame, demonstrate that from inside Ciudad Juárez, feminicidio has been seen as an issue of the government’s incompetence and contextualized as a social problem in the city.Item Open Access Granting Voice to Civil Society: Testing the Indexing Hypothesis in American, Israeli, and Lebanese Newspaper Coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict(2010-12-10) Weinberger, LaurenThis study tests W. Lance Bennett’s indexing hypothesis in The New York Times (USA), The Jerusalem Post (Israel), and the Daily Star (Lebanon), analyzing their coverage of the Israeli disengagement from the Gaza strip from December 18, 2003 until September 12, 2005. This research focuses on the extent to which non-government officials, and NGOs particularly, were used as sources within this coverage. In considering all three newspapers, government sources were utilized at a rate of 68-69% within non-opinion pieces, with NGOs constituting 1-5% of sources. Variation in the use of government vs. non-government sources was not statistically significant when comparing the three newspapers, thus indicating that the indexing hypothesis was applicable in the context of American, Israeli, and Lebanese English-language media. While literature indicates the importance of civil society organizations in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, their voices were rarely apparent in the coverage analyzed. Interviews with NGO representatives and reporters revealed several possible explanations for the heavy use of government sources found in this study, including: the possibility that government officials have greater resources than NGOs in reaching out to the press, NGOs influence news coverage by speaking to reporters but are not cited explicitly as sources in articles, and that the specific case study of the disengagement particularly lends itself to the use of government sources.Item Open Access Imagining Irelands: Migration, Media, and Locality in Modern Day Dublin(2011) Thornburg, AaronThis dissertation explores the place of Irish-Gaelic language (Gaeilge) television and film media in the lives of youths living in the urban greater Dublin metropolitan area in the Republic of Ireland. By many accounts, there has been a Gaeilge renaissance underway in recent times. The number of Gaeilge-medium primary and secondary schools (Gaelscoileanna) has grown throughout the 1990s and into the twenty-first century, the year 2003 saw the passage of the Official Languages Act (laying the groundwork to assure all public services would be made available in Gaeilge as well as English), and as of January 2007 Gaeilge has become a working language of the European Union. Importantly, a Gaeilge television station (TG4) was established in 1996. This development has increased the amount of Gaeilge media significantly, and that television and film media is increasingly being utilized in Gaeilge classrooms.
The research for this dissertation was based on a year of fieldwork conducted in Dublin, Ireland. The primary methodology was semi-structured interviews with teenage second-level-school students who were enrolled in compulsory Gaeilge classes at two schools in the greater Dublin area. Simultaneous examination of social discourses, in the form of prevalent television and film media, and the talk of the teenage students I interviewed led me to discern a "locality production" process that can be discerned in both these forms of discourse. While it is noted that this process of locality production may be present anywhere, it is suggested that it may be particularly pronounced in Ireland as a result of a traditional emphasis on "place" on the island.
This dissertation thus makes a contribution to Irish and Media Studies through an analysis of Gaeilge cultural productions in the context of increased effects of globalization on the lives of the youth with whom I did my research. Additionally, this dissertation contributes to an on-going critique of identity-based theorizations through contribution of an alternative framework.
Item Open Access Killing Iraq: A look at agency and power in relation to the U.S. mainstream media(2009-05-01T15:15:25Z) Ighile, OsagieItem Open Access Media Framing of the Ebola Crisis(2016-01-24) Vellek, TheresaThis study examines the role of international media framing in coverage of Ebola. A quantitative content analysis compared framing techniques in Ebola coverage across BBC Monitoring, The New York Times, The Daily Telegraph (UK), and The Straits Times (Singapore) in the 2000-2001 and 2014-2015 outbreaks. Results show that mutation contagion was by far the most frequently appearing frame in the media. Recent media coverage also mimicked the tendency to represent Ebola as distinctively “African,” as found in research on the 1990s Ebola outbreak. Additionally, the portrayal of Ebola as a globalized threat was especially important in coverage of the 2014 outbreak. Overall, media coverage of the Ebola crisis appeared highly politicized and event-based. Particularly because the media serve as the primary source of information about infectious disease epidemics for much of the public, their framing has implications for how the world views Ebola.Item Embargo Narrating the Covid-19 Cyber-Memoryscape in China: from the Social Media Infodemic to the Politicisation of Pandemic(2023) Hu, HuanqiuWhen it comes to issues concerning the media and communication system in contemporary China , a monolithic view of a top-down, hierarchical order between the repressing party-state censorship vs. the repressed media dominates the discussion in general. It is true that all media are under surveillance and control of the party-state, and this is usually the central focus of existing scholarship in this area. However, the simple presence of media and information control does not predetermine the uses to which media are put. Today, under the digital transformation of contemporary media systems, alternative organizations and individuals can voice out and communicate with the public in the interconnected cyber space. Therefore, the previous absolute discursive power of the party-state has been divided, shifted, and distributed.The COVID-19 pandemic and infodemic crisis have already shown us that apart from the tightening online censorship and digital surveillance, there are more complex and even unpredictable processes of negotiation, contestation, competition and even conspiracy between different power dynamics. Those cyber activities and discourses that shape collective memories of this pandemic era can tell us much about the changing dynamics among the party-state, economy, media, and society, as well as the ways in which these forces interact and clash in China today. This thesis adopts a cultural studies approach that examines a series of online pandemic-narratives and some significant public events and social movements that had been caused and directed by these narratives. Chapter 1, from spatial dimension, illustrates the complexity of the dynamics between different powers that are moving between various knots in the meshy discursive (inter)net space. Chapter 2, from temporal dimension, demonstrates the complexity of the process, both the occurrence and development, of cyber public events and social movements in the arena of digital communication sphere. By drawing a series of cases from a wide range of media texts and communication practices, I try to move beyond the conventional dichotomy and to explore the vast array of variations concerning nationalism, class, and other social conflicts in contemporary China. It is my hope that by directing attention toward the complexities and interdependencies of these cyber activities and discourses, I could offer an alternative way of looking at Chinese media and communication system, as well as the drastic social changes under the crisis of pandemic.
Item Open Access Piety in Production: Video Filmmaking as Religious Encounter in Bénin(2018) Smithson, Brian C.This dissertation considers the production of video films by Nàgó–Yorùbá creators along Bénin’s southeastern border with Nigeria. There they find themselves at the margins of three better-funded arts industries with contrasting attitudes toward Nàgó–Yorùbá culture and aesthetics. In Nigeria, much of the Nollywood video film industry supports belonging to global religious movements, such as Pentecostal Christianity and Reformist Islam, all the while portraying indigenous religion as diabolical. The art-film scene of Bénin often dismisses West African video films as amateurish. Finally, Bénin’s state arts programs promote the Vodun religion of the coast as a tourist attraction yet deny Nàgó–Yorùbá people compensation for the state’s appropriation of their religious arts into the category of “Vodun.” Against this backdrop, video filmmakers use movies to celebrate indigenous religion and culture, to promote religious ecumenism, and to seek new sources of material support. Nevertheless, Nigerian media saturates the marketplace in Bénin so that very few local video films can earn a profit. My study thus seeks to determine how Nàgó–Yorùbá media practitioners persist in the face of such precarious conditions. I ask how the production of media becomes a forum to debate and establish norms of community and religious practice, how national identity, religious affiliation, and professional prestige affect negotiations over religious attitudes and conceptions of community, and how the open style of production in Bénin allows a diverse group of people—media professionals and others—to participate in the debates and discussions that shape media projects.
My work is based on twenty-two months of ethnographic fieldwork at the Bénin–Nigeria border. During this time, I learned moviemaking from video filmmakers directly, acting in their productions, learning camerawork and editing, and eventually producing my own video film. I argue that Nàgó–Yorùbá video filmmakers make video movies because doing so is a community-sustaining endeavor. These efforts grant video filmmakers a prominent status in their communities as recognizable and relatable faces, and as the conveners of social activities on sets and in studios where they mingle and discuss productions with colleagues and audience members. This intimacy turns video filmmaking into what I call a production public, a group whose activities not only create media, but also negotiate the audiovisual aesthetics by which religion and culture are shown on screen. In the face of disappearing profits and intense competition, their activities are precarious, but as long as this public continues to make media, video filmmakers assume the role of moral authorities in the community while working with audiences and patrons to shape attitudes toward religious ecumenism, morality, and ethical engagement with regional and global forces. The public crafts an image of ideal community behavior that supports indigenous Nàgó–Yorùbá religion, rejects religious strife, and looks for ways to export its moral outlook to others.
Item Open Access Practicing Disbelief: Atheist Media in America from the Nineteenth Century to Today(2016) Chalfant, EricWhile the field of religious studies increasingly turns toward material culture as a counterbalance to understandings of religion that privilege questions of individual belief, theology, and text, influential histories of atheism in the West remain largely confined to the mode of intellectual history. This is understandable when atheism is commonly understood first-and-foremost as an idea about the nonexistence of God. But like religion, atheism is not a purely intellectual position; it is rooted in interpersonal emotional exchanges, material objects and media, and historically-contextual social communities. This dissertation uses tools from the materialist turns in both religious studies and media studies to explore the history of American atheism and its reliance on non-intellectual and non-rational forces. Drawing on theories of affect, visual culture, and aesthetics, it argues that atheism in America has always been more than an idea. In particular, it uses different media forms as lenses to examine the material bases of evolving forms of American disbelief from the 19th century to today. Using archival records of nineteenth-century print media and political cartoons, transcripts and audio-recordings of radio broadcasts during the mid-twentieth-century, and digital ethnography and discourse analysis on contemporary Internet platforms, this dissertation argues that American irreligion has often eschewed the rational in favor of emotional and material strategies for defining a collective identity. Each chapter highlights different metaphors that have been enabled by print, broadcast, and digital media – metaphors that American unbelievers have used to complicate the understanding of atheism as simply a set of beliefs about the nature of reality.
Item Open Access Shukhi-ye Zesht o Tekrāri: Performing Blackness in Iranian Entertainment(2018-04-18) Mostafavi, ParmidaThere persists a lack of consistent critical engagement with issues of race, particularly Blackness, in Iranian spaces, despite the continuous presence of “race” in the Iranian experience. As such engagements with Blackness range from a denial of its existence in Iran to famous rapper Hichkas calling the beloved blackface figure, Hājji Firuz, as shukhi-ye zesht o tekrāri—an ugly and tired joke. This thesis explores what race means in non-Western contexts, specifically through audio-visual manifestations of race in cultural rituals and products. Siāh-bāzi, or “playing black,” blackface performances are a form of traditional theatre in which the blackface character serves as racialized comic relief. Much more common and well-known, Hājji Firuz is a perennial blackface character that announces the coming of spring and the spring New Year (Nowruz), whose racialization is also indispensable to his performances. Finally, in a more authentic portrayal of Black Iranian identity through the character of Bashu in Bahram Beyza’i’s celebrated film Bashu, the Little Stranger (1985), race nevertheless continues to be manifested physically through a visual Othering that becomes somewhat resolved through participation in the nation-state’s institutions and standard language, while at the same time revealing the racism in Iranian society and the failures of the nation-state. In examining representations of Blackness, whether as blackface performances or authentic portrayals, this thesis investigates broader questions of race, Othering, nationalism, and scholarship while questioning the wholesale application of English-language, Western-based theories to an Iranian context and rejecting essentialist analyses.Item Open Access Technics Before Time: Experiencing Rationalism and the Techno-Aesthetics of Speculation(2018) Rambo, DavidTechnics Before Time: Experiencing Rationalism and the Techno-Aesthetics of Speculation proposes a philosophy of technicity, or a theory of what it means for tools, techniques, and technologies—or simply technics—to be technical. Logically anterior to the everyday utility of technical objects as well as to the notion of technics as prosthetics for human faculties, technicity is a category that allows me to elaborate diverse and creative participations in technical existences without presupposing an essentialist or techno-determinist ideology. Whereas other philosophies of technics delimit technicity to a presupposed range of what a technical object can be, I attend to the structures and processes that define a technical reinvention of reality. This opens the technical, including the human’s participation in it, well beyond both extensions of physical laws of nature (à la Gilbert Simondon) and consciously liveable memories (à la Bernard Stiegler).
The dissertation has eight chapters organized into three parts, each with their own case study from popular culture that both exemplifies and challenges the theoretical arguments. Part One examines how effects pedals used by electric guitarists, known as “stomp boxes,” mediate sound across layered orders of magnitude and otherwise incommensurable domains of phenomena. This clarifies the superpositional structure of intentional acts in Stiegler’s underdeveloped notion of technics as “organized inorganic matter”; and it undermines Simondon’s exclusion of human and cultural aesthetic values from the physico-chemical functioning intrinsic to technics. Part Two moves to the domain of technical subjects, specifically the creative thought process by which transcendental phenomenology linguistically constructs concepts to explain worldly genesis anterior to all objectification. German philosopher Eugen Fink’s speculative critique of phenomenology foregrounds the written performance of conceptualizing the pre-conscious creation of horizons of experience, which finds a pop cultural analogy in the rules systems, instruments of play, and collective world building in tabletop role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons. Pushing Stiegler’s technical critique of phenomenology to its logical denouement, I convert transcendental subjectivity into a transcendental technicity that integrates human thought into a broader, distributed field of technical cognition. Part Three finalizes the formulation of technicity proper, not just its objective and subjective forms, with a speculative theory of invention that pertains to material processes at a general, neutral level anterior to their sociocultural and conscious integration. On the theoretical side, I deploy Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy to fill out the systematic categorization of technicity so that it obtains maximum applicability to actually existing technics. On the techno-aesthetic side, I levy my novel perspective against the intuitive interpretation that blood and gore in computer games represent violence. Instead, analyzed according to the technical form of the game, gore functions first and foremost as a non-mimetic operator of a computational structure that exists through a human player’s participation.
The dissertation therefore intervenes into two broadly conceived trajectories of media theory: the prosthetic interpretation of technical media and the media-specific analysis of nonhuman phenomena. My elaboration of technicity provides an explanation of how each trajectory correctly understands its target phenomena according to its presupposed domain of abstraction. Understanding technicity as a generic process of material invention offers a productive alternative to recent speculative philosophies that oppose the human to the nonhuman. Instead, it specifies the idea of technics in relation to the more general notion of the medium as a ground for particular existences, and it recognizes the inseparability of rational concept and the sensible particularities of experience. To the extent that the human, in its experience and social organization, is technically constituted, grasping technics at such a philosophically general level can expand the disciplinary range and creative potential of the humanities.
Item Open Access The Dream Refinery: Psychics, Spirituality and Hollywood in Los Angeles(2016) Orey, Spencer DwightThis ethnography examines the relationship between mass-mediated aspirations and spiritual practice in Los Angeles. Creative workers like actors, producers, and writers come to L.A. to pursue dreams of stardom, especially in the Hollywood film and television media industries. For most, a “big break” into their chosen field remains perpetually out of reach despite their constant efforts. Expensive workshops like acting classes, networking events, and chance encounters are seen as keys to Hollywood success. Within this world, rumors swirl of big breaks for devotees in the city’s spiritual and religious organizations. For others, it is in consultations with local spiritual advisors like professional psychics that they navigate everyday decisions of how to achieve success in Hollywood. As Hollywood attracts creative workers, the longstanding spiritual economy in its shadow attracts spiritual practitioners from around the world, some of whom seek to launch high-profile spiritual careers for themselves by advising other dreamers in Los Angeles.
At stake is how contemporary spiritual organizations and media industries co-create mass aspirations that circulate globally and become lucrative projects in the pursuit of their fulfillment in Los Angeles. Taking up Hortense Powdermaker’s famous description of Hollywood as a “dream factory,” I call attention to the “dream refinery” at work throughout Los Angeles. Through attention to spirituality, I examine how mass-mediated aspirations become embodied by individuals and then made into local projects that can be refined, influenced, and transformed. Hollywood has long been closed for ethnographic access. My work shows that Hollywood and its global influence can be accessed through para-industries to Hollywood. In the shadow of Hollywood, many people and industries work on the dreams of aspirational individuals. By foregrounding spirituality in Los Angeles as a spiritual economy made up of interconnected industries, I examine the historical and contemporary proliferation of spiritual groups, practitioners, and professionals in Los Angeles. Tracking the work of professionals like psychics who work on the dreams of their clients, I follow the dreams and struggles of aspirational individuals in Los Angeles. I examine the consequences that turning to spirituality can have on dreams, the worlds that emerge out of imbuing aspirations with spirituality, and various forms through which spiritual industries appeal to aspirational populations. Based on longterm ethnographic fieldwork with professional psychics, spiritual practitioners, media professionals, and Hollywood hopefuls, my research examines the spiritual economy of Hollywood dreams in Los Angeles.
Item Open Access The influence of audience: Analyzing the relationship between post-Sandy Hook newspaper coverage and readers’ positions on gun policy(2014-01-09) Koelsch, AnnaThe Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut took place on December 14, 2012. Sandy Hook prompted President Barack Obama to issue 23 executive orders related to gun policy in early 2013. Newspapers throughout the country covered the policy changes and the Sandy Hook shooting in various ways. In the 90 days after Sandy Hook, 30 randomly selected newspapers published 1,017 articles mentioning guns in the context of the shooting. Fifteen newspapers were more likely to use gun control to characterize the shooting, fourteen were more likely to use gun rights, and one newspaper was evenly split in its use of gun control and gun rights. Newspapers also varied in the percentage of their total articles that mentioned guns in the context of Sandy Hook. Newspapers that published a larger percentage of their overall articles that mentioned guns in the context of Sandy Hook were more likely to frame the event with gun control. These newspaper articles were also examined using audience demand theory, which posits that demand may shape the way newspapers cover issues. Specifically, demand for gun rights newspaper coverage was measured using the number of donations to the National Rifle Association Political Action Committee. This number of NRA PAC donations per population in a given area slightly positively related with greater use of gun rights frames, and slightly negatively related with greater use of gun control frames, but these relationships were not statistically significant. This project suggests that audience demand theory can be applied to newspaper coverage of guns.Item Open Access The Iranian Hostage Crisis: A War of Words, not Worlds(2008-10-20T13:24:19Z) Simon, AndrewU.S. media presented the Iranian hostage crisis as a decisive attack against America and therefore the American people. Initially, the media discussed only factual information on the crisis and referred to the players according to their occupation; however, every hostage soon appeared as a victim whose life hung in the balance of terrorists, led by a religious fanatic. No longer were the hostage takers viewed as students under the orders of a religious leader. The purpose behind the embassy takeover and atrocities committed under the U.S.-installed shah regime were never mentioned, at least in the U.S. media intended for the public eye. The absence of the other side’s perspective led to the formation of a unilateral opinion regarding the Iranian hostage crisis, the hostage takers, and the hostages; surely, it was a battle between good and evil forces. President Carter’s administration preached passivity; other politicians, such as former Texas Governor John Connally, devised daring rescue plans in an effort to gain political clout in a fragile America. No matter the course of action advised the victimized hostages had been the main concern and the loss of one life as a motive for war between the U.S. and Iran. Both countries publicly presented their own agendas with conflicting outcomes and neither country was willing to negotiate, a sign of weakness. The outcome of the crisis was the last 52 hostages being freely returned to the United States 444 days later, leading to an unforeseen turn in events. Many of the hostages, who had been depicted as abused and tortured, told stories of sympathy and remorse. Some questioned why America saw the hostage takers as terrorists and not students, while others questioned why America built the hostage crisis into such a spectacle. The hostages’ accounts of American imperialism and Iranian hardship did not make the ten o’clock news; their stories may have led to a more balanced take on the hostage crisis. I intend not to say which view, the hostages or the medias, was correct or wrong, but to present both sides of the Iranian hostage crisis dialogue and analyze the vivid contrasts between the two; I also intend to analyze the internal divisions within the hostage accounts. In a time of great danger, U.S. politics and media worked as one entity and presented an argument drastically different from that of many hostages.